


The Myriad Forms of Monsters

by GretchenSinister



Series: My Top 20 Short Gen Fics [7]
Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-18
Updated: 2019-03-18
Packaged: 2019-11-23 09:30:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18150086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "I was thinking about how fear is different to different people; some would consider the dark ‘safe’ because in the dark, people can’t find you. So can I have a fill where Pitch – and possibly the other Guardians as well, though they’re more concrete, so maybe just Jack, as Winter is more concept-y and thus more subject to change – appear different to different people? Like, for someone who felt safe in the dark, Pitch would be blinding, although the form we saw was his default."Pitch can take on many, many forms. Some, he enjoys. Others, he loathes. Always, the mind of the fearful one gives him the form he must take.





	The Myriad Forms of Monsters

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 10/10/2014.

Pitch enjoyed being a monster. He loved to find himself looking out of a dozen compound eyes, scuttling over the ground on innumerable chitinous legs, each longer than a man was tall, ending in jagged, knifelike claws. He delighted in taking on the lumbering form of some thick-pelted, thick-muscled thing that ought not to walk through little stands of suburban trees, with eyes that reflected back trembling flashlight beams from twelve feet off the ground. He gloried in twisting through the air and water in a sinuous line that went on for far too long and longer still, the eerie gold bioluminescence shifting over his skin dazzling anyone who dared to look.  
  
He enjoyed every horn, every tooth, every claw, every fin, every limb and eye and strange skin that the mind of the terrified bestowed upon him.  
  
But what he loved most of all was when he became nothing more–and nothing less–than the darkness all the lights of the modern world could never drive out. So long as anything that was not solely light existed–and it always would, for creatures of flesh, as humans uncomfortably were, could not subsist on pure light–something would always be around to cast a shadow. There would always be some little fragments of mystery around, a side of things that couldn’t be easily seen, where anything–anything at all–could lurk, and lurk quite comfortably.  
  
Especially when, as happened more often than people might care to admit to themselves, night fell and the darkness could not be stopped from growing vast and all-encompassing as it had ever been. That kind of darkness called to Pitch, it welcomed him home, and, in many ways, it was him, for he often slipped out of his form to fill it. Darkness might be nothing, but oh! what a nothing, a nothing of infinite space!  
  
His love for this darkness was why his commonest form was so simple–a few mere lines of figure in gray and black. A shadow, walking on its own. A shadow, easily cast off and into the welcoming darkness.  
  
The darkness would always welcome him, though, whether he slipped into it from his shadow form first, or from another.  
  
It was from the forms he hated, that he often moved into the darkness, to make sure it was still welcoming, for the forms he hated made him wish to check the darkness again and again, to make sure it was still vast, and to make sure there was room enough in it for more than one thin Boogeyman to hide.  
  
The forms he hated the most were myriad, but varied little, compared to all the other shapes he could take. He never chose these forms, because sometimes they made him shy away from even his shadow-figure with loathing. But though he never chose these forms, they were all too often forced upon him by the fears of children who saw him, and more-than-children, who shouldn’t have been able to see him in the first place.  
  
But these never suspected they saw the Boogeyman, for the forms he hated were those of ordinary men.  
  
There had never been a time in all his millennia when he was free of the form of man, and it was for this reason that he knew that the dark must remain, if not for itself, at least for a place to hide. A place where things that should not be known were not known, for a time.  
  
For the dark was the only real thing he could offer, even as the forms he hated felt all too fleshy as he wore them. He could not offer real fangs or real claws, real strength or real wings. These were all too insubstantial to those he wanted to feel them. But the darkness was real, and the darkness could hide. He built it up with all the fear he gathered from those he terrified with the forms he loved.  
  
He thought that those that quaked before him as a beautiful never-was monster would consider the trade a fair one.


End file.
